Don’t forget Israeli vote was a free vote

Dr Kevin McCarthy (Letters, Irish Examiner) is, of course, perfectly entitled to deplore Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral success but he stretches the point when he claims that it is “a triumph for the politics of fear over socio-economics [in which] he created national security paranoia in the last days of a bitterly divisive election campaign”.

The Israeli electorate are clearly fearful of the underlying Palestinian objectives which they perceive as being the elimination of Israel.

As a result they voted for ‘life’ rather than ‘quality of life’.

They may be paranoid but the evidence seems to be that their fears are not entirely unfounded.

In any case this was a free vote, something almost unheard of in any Arab country, let alone the Palestinian Authority where Mahmooud Abbas should have called elections more than five years ago.

Martin D Stern

Hanover Gardens

Salford

M7 4FQ

England